Stonewall (1993)

by Martin
Duberman

One of the most important moments of resistance from the 1960s was the Stonewall Rebellion. On the night of June 27-28, 1969, a multiracial group of gays who had gathered at the Stonewall Inn on Christopher Street in New York City's Greenwich Village resisted when police sought to shut down the bar (allegedly for serving alcohol without a license) and to arrest patrons. They fought back, as the historian Martin Duberman recounts here, and, in doing so, helped spur a new, more militant phase of the struggle for gay liberation. —Introduction from Zinn and Arnove's Voices of a People's History of the United States

As
the police, amid a growing crowd and mounting anger, continued to
load prisoners into the van, Martin Boyce, an eighteen-year-old scare
drag queen, saw a leg in nylons and sporting a high heel shoot out of
the back of the paddy wagon into the chest of a cop, throwing him
backward. Another queen then opened the door on the side of the wagon
and jumped out. The cops chased and caught her, but Blond Frankie
[Frank Esselourne] quickly managed to engineer another escape from
the van; several queens successfully made their way out with him and
were swallowed up in the crowd. Tammy Novak was one of them; she ran
all the way to Joe Tish's apartment, where she holed up throughout
the weekend. The police handcuffed subsequent prisoners to the inside
of the van, and succeeded in driving away from the scene to book them
at the precinct house. Deputy Inspector Seymour Pine, the ranking
officer, nervously told the departing police to "just drop them
off at the Sixth Precinct and hurry back."

From
this point on, the melee broke out in several directions and swiftly
mounted in intensity. The crowd, now in full cry, started screaming
epithets at the police—"Pigs!" "Faggot cops!"
Sylvia [(Ray) Rivera] and Craig [Rodwell] enthusiastically joined in,
Sylvia shouting her lungs out, Craig letting go with a full-throated
"Gay power!" One young gay Puerto Rican went fearlessly up
to a policeman and yelled in his face, "What you got against
faggots? We don't do you nuthin'!" Another teenager started
kicking at a cop, frequently missing as the cop held him at arm's
length. One queen mashed an officer with her heel, knocked him down,
grabbed his handcuff keys, freed herself, and passed the keys to
another queen behind her.

By
now, the crowd had swelled to a mob, and people were picking up and
throwing whatever loose objects came to hand—coins, bottles,
cans, bricks from a nearby construction site. Someone even picked up
dog shit from the street and threw it in the cops' direction. As the
fever mounted, Zucchi [Zookie Zarfas] was overheard nervously asking
Mario what the hell the crowd was upset about: the Mafia or the
police? The police, Mario reassured him. Zucchi gave a big grin of
relief and decided to vent some stored-up anger of his own: He egged
on bystanders in their effort to rip up a damaged fire hydrant and he
persuaded a young kid named Timmy to throw the wire-mesh garbage can
nearby. Timmy was not much bigger than the can (and had just come out
the week before), but he gave it his all—the can went sailing
into the plate-glass window (painted black and reinforced from behind
by plywood) that stretched across the front of the Stonewall.

Stunned
and frightened by the crowd's unexpected fury, the police, at the
order of Deputy Inspector Pine, retreated inside the bar. Pine had
been accustomed to two or three cops being able to handle with ease
any number of cowering gays, but here the crowd wasn't cowering; it
had routed eight cops and made them run for cover. As Pine later
said, "I had been in combat situations, [but] there was never
any time that I felt more scared than then." With the cops holed
up inside Stonewall, the crowd was now in control of the street, and
it bellowed in triumph and pent-up rage.

Craig
dashed to a nearby phone booth. Ever conscious of the need for
publicity—for visibility—and realizing that a critical
moment had arrived, he called all three daily papers, the Times,
the Post, and the News, and alerted them that "a
major news story was breaking." Then he ran to his apartment a
few blocks away to get his camera.

Jim
Fouratt also dashed to the phones—to call his straight
radical-left friends, to tell them "people were fighting the
cops—it was just like Newark!" He urged them to rush down
and lend their support (just as he had long done for their causes).
Then he went into the nearby Ninth Circle and Julius' [bar], to try
to get the patrons to come out into the street. But none of them
would. Nor did any of his straight radical friends show up. It taught
Jim a bitter lesson about how low on the scale of priorities his
erstwhile comrades ranked "faggot" concerns.

Gary
tried to persuade Sylvia to go home with him to get a change of
clothes. "Are you nuts?" she yelled. "I'm not missing
a minute of this—it's the revolution!" So Gary left to get
clothes for both of them. Blond Frankie, meanwhile—perhaps
taking his cue from Zucchi—uprooted a loose parking meter and
offered it for use as a battering ram against the Stonewall's door.
At nearly the same moment somebody started squirting lighter fluid
through the shattered glass window on the bars facade, tossing in
matches after it. Inspector Pine later referred to this as "throwing
Molotov cocktails into the place," but the only reality that
described was the inflamed state of Pines nerves.

Still,
the danger was very real, and the police were badly frightened. The
shock to self-esteem had been stunning enough; now came an actual
threat to physical safety. Dodging flying glass and missiles,
Patrolman Gil Weisman, the one cop in uniform, was hit near the eye
with a shard, and blood spurted out. With that, the fear turned
abruptly to fury. Three of the cops, led by Pine, ran out the front
door, which had crashed in from the battering, and started screaming
threats at the crowd, thinking to cow it. But instead a rain of coins
and bottles came down, and a beer can glanced off Deputy Inspector
Charles Smyths head. Pine lunged into the crowd, grabbed somebody
around the waist, pulled him back into the doorway, and then dragged
him by the hair, inside.

Ironically,
the prisoner was the well-known—and heterosexual—folk
singer Dave Van Ronk. Earlier that night Van Ronk had been in and out
of the Lions Head, a bar a few doors down from Stonewall that catered
to a noisy, macho journalist crowd scornful of the "faggots"
down the block. Once the riot got going, the Lions Head locked its
doors; the management didn't want faggots moaning and bleeding over
the paying customers. As soon as Pine got Van Ronk back into the
Stonewall, he angrily accused him of throwing dangerous objects—a
cue to Patrolman Weisman to shout that Van Ronk was the one who had
cue his eye, and then to start punching the singer hard while several
other cops held him down. When Van Ronk looked as if he was going to
pass out, the police handcuffed him, and Pine snapped, "All
right, we book him for assault."

The
cops then found a fire hose, wedged it into a crack in the door, and
directed the spray out at the crowd, thinking that would certainly
scatter it. But the stream was weak and the crowd howled derisively,
while inside the cops started slipping on the wet floor. A reporter
from The Village Voice, Howard Smith, had retreated inside the
bar when the police did; he later wrote that by that point in the
evening "the sound filtering in [didn't] suggest dancing faggots
any more; it sound[ed] like a powerful rage bent on vendetta."
By now the Stonewall's front door was hanging wide open, the plywood
brace behind the windows was splintered, and it seemed only a matter
of minutes before the howling mob would break in and wreak its
vengeance. One cop armed himself with Tony the Sniff's baseball bat;
the others drew their guns, and Pine stationed several officers on
either side of the corridor leading to the front door. One of them
growled, "We'll shoot the first motherfucker that comes through
the door."

At
that moment, an arm reached in through the shattered window, squirted
more lighter fluid into the room, and then threw in another lit
match. This time the match caught, and there was a whoosh of flame.
Standing only ten feet away, Pine aimed his gun at the receding arm
and (he later said) was preparing to shoot when he heard the sound of
sirens coming down Christopher Street. At two-fifty-five a.m. Pine
had sent out emergency signal 10-41—a call for help to the
fearsome Tactical Patrol Force—and relief was now rounding the
corner.

The
TPF was a highly trained, crack riot-control unit that had been set
up to respond to the proliferation of protests against the Vietnam
War. Wearing helmets with visors, carrying assorted weapons,
including billy clubs and tear gas, its two dozen members all seemed
massively proportioned. They were a formidable sight as, linked arm
in arm, they came up Christopher Street in a wedge formation that
resembled (by design) a Roman legion. In their path, the rioters
slowly retreated, but—contrary to police expectations—did
not break and run. Craig, for one, knelt down in the middle of the
street with the camera he'd retrieved from his apartment and,
determined to capture the moment, snapped photo after photo of the
oncoming TPF minions.'

As
the troopers bore down on him, he scampered up and joined the
hundreds of others who scattered to avoid the billy clubs but then
raced around the block, doubled back behind the troopers, and pelted
them with debris. When the cops realized that a considerable crowd
had simply re-formed to their rear, they flailed out angrily at
anyone who came within striking distance. But the protesters would
not be cowed. The pattern repeated itself several times: The TPF
would disperse the jeering mob only to have it re-form behind them,
yelling taunts, tossing bottles and bricks, setting fires in trash
cans. When the police whirled around to reverse direction at one
point, they found themselves face to face with their worst nightmare:
a chorus line of mocking queens, their arms clasped around each
other, kicking their heels in the air Rockettes-style and singing at
the tops of their sardonic voices:

We
are the Stonewall girls

We
wear our hair in curls

We
wear no underwear

We
show our pubic hair...

We
wear our dungarees

Above
our nelly knees!

It
was a deliciously witty, contemptuous counterpoint to the TPF's brute
force, a tactic that transformed an otherwise traditionally macho
eye-for-an-eye combat and that provided at least the glimpse of a
different and revelatory kind of consciousness. Perhaps that was
exactly the moment Sylvia had in mind when she later said, "Something
lifted off my shoulders."

But
the tactic incited the TPF to yet further violence. As they were
badly beating up on one effeminate-looking boy, a portion of the
angry crowd surged in, snatched the boy away, and prevented the cops
from reclaiming him. Elsewhere, a cop grabbed "a wild Puerto
Rican queen" and lifted his arm as if to dub him. Instead of
cowering, the queen yelled, "How'd you like a big Spanish dick
up your little Irish ass?" The nonplussed cop hesitated just
long enough to give the queen time to run off into the crowd.

The
cops themselves hardly escaped scot-free. Somebody managed to drop a
concrete block on one parked police car; nobody was injured, but the
cops inside were shaken up. At another point, a gold-braided police
officer being driven around to survey the action got a sack of wet
garbage thrown at him through the open window of his car; a direct
hit was scored, and soggy coffee grounds dripped down the officers
face as he tried to maintain a stoic expression. Still later, as some
hundred people were being chased down Waverly Place by two cops,
someone in the crowd suddenly realized the unequal odds and started
yelling, "There are only two of 'em! Catch 'em! Rip their
clothes off! Fuck 'em!" As the crowd took up the cry, the two
officers fled.

Before
the police finally succeeded in clearing the streets—for that
evening only, it would rum out—a considerable amount of blood
had been shed. Among the undetermined number of people injured was
Sylvias friend Ivan Valentin; hit in the knee by a policeman's billy
club, he had ten stitches taken at St. Vincent's Hospital. A teenager
named Lenny had his hand slammed in a car door and lost two ringers.
Four big cops beat up a young queen so badly—there is evidence
that the cops singled out "feminine boys"—that she
bled simultaneously from her mouth, nose, and ears. Craig and Sylvia
both escaped injury (as did Jim, who had hung back on the fringe of
the crowd), but so much blood splattered over Sylvia's blouse that at
one point she had to go down to the piers and change into the clean
clothes Gary had brought back for her.

Four
police officers were also hurt. Most of them sustained minor
abrasions from kicks and bites, but Officer Scheu, after being hit
with a rolled-up newspaper, had fallen to the cement sidewalk and
broken his wrist. When Craig heard that news, he couldn't resist
chuckling over what he called the "symbolic justice" of the
injury. Thirteen people (including Dave Van Ronk) were booked at the
Sixth Precinct, seven of them Stonewall employees, on charges ranging
from harassment to resisting arrest to disorderly conduct. At
three-thirty-five a.m., signal 10—41 was canceled and an uneasy
calm serried over the area. It was not to last.